Background
Sven Oftedal was born on March 22, 1844, in Stavanger, Norway, the son of Svend L. and Gunhild (Stokke) Oftedal.
Sven Oftedal was born on March 22, 1844, in Stavanger, Norway, the son of Svend L. and Gunhild (Stokke) Oftedal.
After training in the Stavanger Latin school, Sven Oftedal entered Christiania University in 1862 and graduated in theology in 1871, his stay there having been interrupted by two years of travel in southern Europe. He continued his studies for a year in Paris.
After studying in Europe, Sven Oftedal emigrated with his family to the United States, where he became professor of theology at Augsburg Seminary, Minneapolis, Minnesota. In June 1874 he was elected president of the board of trustees, which position he held, except for one year, until his death. Educationally, his conviction was that ministers should be trained in a religious, not a secular college, but that they should be educated so that they would not become a caste estranged from the men of every-day life and the priesthood of general believers. Ecclesiastically, he favored the congregationed church polity, viewing the local church as the body of Christ, and the group-church, or synod, as a human organization. He formulated these beliefs in a spirited, personal declaration of independence, Aaben Erklaring (1874). This document, enthusiastically received by many as a manifesto against a Romanizing tendency at work among the Norwegian Lutherans in America, was hotly contested for years, especially in the "Declaration of the Thirty, " presented in 1882 by fourteen ministers and sixteen laymen, members of the Norwegian Lutheran Conference, of which also Oftedal was a member.
Oftedal weathered the storm; but in 1893 it blew up again, this time in the United Norwegian Lutheran Church, into which the Conference and two other church bodies had merged three years before. On this occasion the educational issue was added to the ecclesiastical. The new body would give no guarantees that the college department of Augsburg Seminary would be continued as an integral department of the school, though the agreement had been that the institution was to be the training school for ministers in the new body. A conflict between the Church board and that of Augsburg arose, and the latter with Oftedal as president, was sued, losing in a lower court, but winning before the supreme court in 1898. The clash of issues and the resulting litigation and newspaper comments created ill feeling and even the questioning of Oftedal's honesty, though he had labored more than anybody else for the economic support of the school.
In teaching theology, Oftedal aimed more at the practical than at the theoretical. He defended lay preaching, and attached little value to doctrinal and ecclesiastical formularies. Among German theologians he found much to admire in Michael Baumgarten; among the French, Godet attracted him. He wrote and lectured equally well in English and Norwegian; he was also thoroughly familiar with the classics and at home in the languages of southern Europe, including modern Greek, which he spoke with ease. He was an able preacher and some of his published sermons may be found in Aand og Liv (1898). From 1877 to 1883 he edited, with Sverdrup, a newspaper, Folkebladet; and continued to be a leading contributor to its columns till his death. From 1875 to 1881 he was joint editor of Kvartalskrift for Den Norsk Lutherske Kirke i Amerika, a theological periodical; from 1885 to 1890, joint editor of Lutheraneren, and from 1890 to 1893 of Kirkebladet. For ten years, from 1878, he was a member of the Minneapolis board of public education, being for four years its president; he was also member of the public-library commission from 1886 to 1896, and is known as the father of the Minneapolis branch library and branch high school. As he had been a leader in the Conference, so he was the leader among the "Friends of Augsburg, " a group which was an informal successor to the merged Conference, and in 1897 was organized into the "Lutheran Free Church, " which rallied to the support of Augsburg Seminary.
Oftedal retired as professor at the age of sixty, and went to Greece, but in 1907, at the death of Georg Sverdrup, was again drafted into service by the Seminary, his work now being of a supervisory nature solely. In 1908 King Haakon VII of Norway made him Knight of the first class in the Order of St. Olaf. A lifelong enemy of dogmatism and clericalism, he did not permit the formidable opposition that beat upon him to bend his physical frame or sour his outlook on life. At his death, shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, he was survived by his wife and four children.
Sven Oftedal was a members of the Norwegian Lutheran Conference; the Minneapolis School Board (1878-1888); the Minneapolis Library Board (1886-1896); and the leader among the "Friends of Augsburg. "
Sven Oftedal married in 1873 to Marie L. Gjertsen. They had four children.